romania Archives | Bálint Botos

a play of vivid characterization and dramatic conflict where social realism joins with lyricism, comedy with tragedy, a work rich in psychological and dramatic ambiguities which reveal that apparent polar opposites are not always what they seem.

The society depicted by Ostrovsky in Kalinov is based on his close observation of the mores of merchant communities on the upper reaches of the Volga, and is perhaps not typical of Russian provincial society as a whole. It is a dark kingdom where elements of Russian culture of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries seem to exist, almost unresolved, side by side. From this raw ethnographical material he has produced a play of vivid characterization and dramatic conflict where social realism joins with lyricism, comedy with tragedy, a work rich in psychological and dramatic ambiguities which reveal that apparent polar opposites are not always what they seem.

It is precisely because he has sensed the tragic tensions lying deep within this society and reflected in the semantic ambivalence of many of its central values that Ostrovsky has turned what could have been merely an interesting ethnographical study into one of the dramatic masterpieces of the Russian stage.

R. A. Peace

DIRECTOR: Bálint Botos
STAGE DESIGN: Blanka-Alíz Bajkó
COREOGRAPHER: Attila Bordás

Cast:
Róbert Dunkler, Tamás Jakab, Andrea Fincziski, Norbert Esti, Xénia-Abigél Nagy, Orsolya Albert, Árpád Barabás, Attila Pál, Kata László, Árpád Tóth, Gellért Szűcs-Olcsváry, Emőke Lukács, Helka Dunkler

Kleist ruins any hope that the realities he creates can be sorted out.

It is better to acknowledge such complicity with mess than to defend an illusion in the name of perspicacity. The illusion we easily fall prey to is based on our confusing subjective and objective confusion. As more or less naive readers of Kleist’s perplexing scenarios, we tend to invest in the idea that the protagonists simply misinterpret the situation. This allows us to take a firm stand against mess.

But, indeed, Kleist ruins any hope that the realities he creates can be sorted out. If we read a character as mistaken, we might find it possible to objectively resolve the issue, but doing so will most likely get us caught in a subjective confusion of our own.

Katrin Pahl